In his recent letter, "Current data show food safe from animal antibiotics," John Fisher of the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation left out some key points.
First, although the Food and Drug Administration must approve agricultural drugs, the FDA approved antibiotic feed additives decades ago, long before antibiotic resistance had emerged as a serious threat to human health and long before scientists had learned how agricultural antibiotics could contribute to the problem.
Last year, FDA acknowledged that those old approvals need to be reconsidered, but the agency set no schedule for even starting such reviews, much less completing them. And the process for getting a drug off the market is so cumbersome that it takes six to 20 years to complete per drug or drug class. There are at least seven classes of antibiotics that are used both in human medicine and as feed additives for agricultural animals, so that means it could take FDA more than four decades to address the problem under current law. That's just not acceptable.
Moreover, the "independent experts" who wrote the article cited by Fisher were actually a panel convened by the Animal Health Institute, a trade association of companies that produce antibiotic feed additives. The scientific journal that published the institute's article also has published responses by four separate groups of scientists pointing out that the article was fraught with inaccurate and misleading citations and other errors.
In addition, Denmark, the world's largest pork exporter -- the one country that has ended use of antibiotic feed additives and carefully measures its antibiotic use -- found that overall use of agricultural antibiotics fell by more than 50 percent. And, as the World Health Organization noted in an in-depth report published last year about Denmark's experience, there was essentially no significant impact on animal health (though some piglets developed diarrhea when first weaned).
Finally, the Ohio Family Farm Coalition and, perhaps most important, professional associations involved in human medicine, including the American Medical Association, American Public Health Association, American Academy of Family Physicians, Ohio Public Health Association and dozens of others, oppose the continued routine use of antibiotics in animal agriculture that are important in human medicine. These groups are among more than 350 organizations that have formally endorsed bipartisan legislation sponsored by U.S. Rep. Sherrod Brown, D-Lorain, to phase out over a two-year period the routine feeding of medically important antibiotics to poultry, swine and beef cattle. The Senate version of the bill authorizes funding to help our farmers defray the costs of this two-year phaseout and provides for research and demonstration projects to assist farmers in achieving success with this transition. As a doctor, I know that curbing all nontherapeutic use of antibiotics, both in animals and in humans, to protect human health is simple common sense. DR. DAVID WALLINGA Director, Antibiotic Resistance Project Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy Minneapolis, MNColumbus Dispatch (Ohio)
